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COMEDY – the laugh-out-loud kind – is nearly as rare in opera as in Greek tragedy. But there’s scarcely been more mirth at any opera house than there was Saturday, when the Met offered a double-header of cheer: Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment” in the afternoon, followed by the season’s premiere of Mozart’s “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail.”

Humor needs a normality, either verbal or physical, from which to diverge. Walking across the stage isn’t funny – but slipping on a banana peel while you’re doing it is. Since people rarely run around life singing, that departure from reality can strangle the comic muse.

But “La Fille du Régiment” (“The Daughter of the Regiment”) and “Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail” (“The Abduction From the Harem”) both have spoken dialogue. As I joined the Vivian Beaumont crowd leaving “South Pacific,” it occurred to me that both operas are structurally musical-comedies, in which music of course has the last word.

The new “La Fille” is nothing but enchantment. Instead of the toy-soldier, Tyrolean music-box staging usual to the opera, Laurent Pelly has moved the action up somewhat somberly to World War I, but he has a marvelously comic, vocally superb cast, led by the sweetly smiling Juan Diego Florez as Tonio – the notorious nine top C’s triumphantly in place – and the deliquescent Natalie Dessay as Marie, the regiment’s daughter and Tonio’s love.

They’re a far more nimble pair than their best-known predecessors, the no less vocally agile Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti.

True love lost and found again is also the theme of “Die Entfuhrung.” The old John Dexter/Jocelyn Herbert 1979 staging wears its years lightly, and David Robertson conducts the proceedings with Mozartian clarity.

The diva du jour was German soprano Diana Damrau, singing with a translucent sheen and acting with the stoic grace befitting Konstanze, who’s stolen by pirates and ends up in a harem.

Matthew Polenzani, with his suave, handsomely modulated tenor, cut a dashing figure as her lover, who, after tears and tribulation, engineers her escape.

Here the comedy is left in the sure hands and surer voices of the lovers’ servants, Blondchen (a delicious Aleksandra Kurzak) and Pedrillo (Steve Davislim) and, the wonderfully assured bass, Kristinn Sigmundsson, as the harem’s overseer, Osmin, one of the indisputably, knock-‘em-dead, comic roles in all opera.